Oh look we're back to the "open source software can't survive on its own without gobs of money and million-dollar CEOs wah wah wah" again.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Fiy, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the highest rates charities on Charity Navigator.
They don't always make the best choices as far as product direction, but as a charity, they are quite respectable.
You say that as if we're lying. Mozilla's entire revenue is from the search deal. If it goes away, you can kiss the entire company goodbye. Not saying that OSS is inherently unable to survive or anything like that.
Then die. Open source software wasn't created to generate revenue.
Wtf you on about?
The grand majority of all costs for Firefox are in engineering salaries. And there is no million dollar CEO relating to the nonprofit's expenses, that CEO is paid for from funds from the for profit organization.
Browsers are CRAZY expensive to build and maintain. And teams of engineers are crazy expensive.
Thank you for repeating the talking points.
And what percentage of Mozilla's income goes towards Firefox?
Mozilla sucks as much as Wikipedia when it comes to funding
Send another Luigi Mangione
Their pants are being the sun again
Why can't they just use the Wikipedia model? That should bring in enough to cover development and operating costs.
Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.
Wikimedia is even using php still. Firefox created Rust I believe, in order to advance.
Ceo makes how much?
CEO is paid for from the for profit. The majority of costs are engineering salaries for Firefox.
Yeah, but their job is like reeeally hard!! They deserve it. /s
What difference would it make if CEO got a minimum wage if there is no stable income stream for the company regardless?
Because having a CEO earning 100x of an average employee disincentivizes looking for stable, consumer-friendly income streams.
Why would the leadership want that, the only way they can continue paying themselves that much money is by sucking big tech's tit.
Slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.
Well goodbye mozilla it wasn't great knowing you. Hopefully you are able to fuck over the devs and golden parachute your c-suite bastards one last time.
Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename "Phoenix" and went by "Firebird" for some time before becoming "Firefox".
Maybe it's time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off...
Any fork will die a slow and painful death of it can't get the necessary funding for project management and maintainer salaries.
It will also dwindle, hard, towards irrelevancy.
In world where the only viable browser is one owned and operated by Google.
The fork that takes off will be the one where the Firefox devs move to. Which isn't predictable. We could make our own foundation, without the blackjack and hookers (cause based on how mozilla was doing things it sure seems like all they did), and make it more as a means for the devs to get paid for their work.
There are already several forks that are fairly popular.
Yup. I've been using Floorp for a few months now. But I think a lot of these forks rely on Mozilla for the heavy lifting
The problem isn't the existence of forks, it's rather how many developers are behind them. Mozilla has around 750 employees, so I'd guess maybe around 500 full-time devs work on Firefox. Tor Browser and such have significantly fewer contributors, who only do this stuff in their free time.
and before that it was Netscape
I thought Netscape turned into Mozilla, which was different from Firebird
Correct. Firefox was a rewrite separate from the old Netscape/Mozilla SeaMonkey codebase.
Maybe, just as a crazy thought here, jwz was right. Mozilla and Firefox exist for 2 purposes - to build the standard reference browser, free of corporate crud (like, say, Google WebExtensions); and to be an absolute attack dog against ridiculous corporate desires.
Didn’t get the second part, wdym?
I mean mainly fighting against the standardization of DRM, or tolerating anything that allows corporations to demand their "features" (anything that removes privacy) become standard. The difference between a good browser and a bad one shouldn't be whether you can finagle a Widevine license for cheap.
Or, more generally, they should be actively blocking anything that would benefit corporate interests over the rights of the people. But since the Linux Foundation threw in with Google, Microsoft is a Google client, and Mozilla Corp runs on Google money, the W3C has been a joke for years. Mozilla has made themselves irrelevant, since they were just seen as a means to prevent the Google antitrust cases.
Hopefully this breakup of Google, and the loss of the money, will get the CEO (currently earning 1% of the total of Mozilla's money - no one person should do that unless there's less than 100 people), and that whole bunch to leave so that volunteers can take over.
Its interesting they don't have all the services Proton does. I'd pay them for a email and VPN combo.
Won’t give my money to these greedy people
Sorry, why are they greedy?
Everyone on Lemmy thinks getting paid for labor is fascism.
Pre buy out, Opera was kind of moving towards what Proton is doing now.
Now Vivaldi sets to continue that trajectory.
It's weird that Mozilla didn't. If they do it now they'll look like copycats, and they've burnt a lot of supporters with their TOS boogaloo it would take a lot from them to claw back some of those supporters
right? thats a golden opportunity right there. they are sure taking their sweet time with their email service.
How much active development does a browser engine need? If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren't supported? Because as it sits, Firefox feels like one of the most corporate pieces of open source software I use daily, and I need to know just how tragic it would be if Mozilla died.
In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.
These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.
I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.
So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".
A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.
How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don't want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.
Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there's nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google's interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.
It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.
If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported?
Likely yes, as Google will keep enshittifying the web unless stopped by antitrust or whatever. Which isn't looking so likely.
It requires a lot, you can try running an older version of a browser to see
Or look at all the memes people made about up to date chrome being better than out of date explorer
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Except it isn't. And we know it isn't because the amount you spend on Firefox vs the rest of Mozilla is peanuts
Not even remotely true, this is a myth. Most of what they spend is on development, operations, and legal. They publish their 990 online which gives the breakdown. IIRC the foundation gets like 2%.
How is this false then? I don’t get it
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